Now I know which dissertation chapter to write next. (Perhaps too ambitious) abstract follows:

Toward a Responsible Pedagogy: Linguistic Standardization and the Erasure of Language, 1878-2007

When it comes to speakers of different dialects, can “rhetorical pedagogies,” as this year’s CFP asks, “promote understanding and identification?” This paper suggests that the answer is yes only if we resist “the erasure of language” from the composition classroom, as Susan Peck MacDonald’s June CCC article of that title urges (though it traces the very process of erasure since the 1970s). Instead of ignoring language, our instruction in composition should provide our students with metalinguistic awareness—teaching, for instance, about grammatical choices.

In support of such a pedagogy, this paper looks back, proposing that we reinvestigate late-nineteenth-century grammar and rhetoric textbooks. The period was unusually concerned with dialect and grammatical deviance—as literature, newspapers, and the furious publication of both linguistic self-help and grammatical criticism books all attest. Scholars have traced to roughly this moment (Adams Sherman Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric appeared in 1878) the current-traditional rhetoric—which Sharon Crowley has critiqued for “its theoretical backwardness and its pedagogical limitations.” But this paper will argue that current-traditional’s pedagogical limitations, by ignoring the process of composition and remaining inattentive to language itself, effectively rewarded possessors of linguistic capital, legitimating their existing linguistic practices and hence enhancing their value on various markets (occupational, social, and economic). If the current-traditional pedagogy thus salved the linguistic anxiety expressed by the culturally refined in the nineteenth century, then its conservative thrust has remained underanalyzed.

I'm using George Gopen's style textbook, The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader's Perspective, for my RHE 310 class right now, and as his subtitle indicates, Gopen is interested in the quality of writing precisely insofar as it communicates (or doesn't) with (and also communicates its intended effects to) readers. By studying how readers read, for instance, he tells us early on, we've learned that location of important concepts (in a sentence or in a paragraph) matters far more than something like word choice.

But for me, here's the kicker:

The important person is not the writer; it is the reader. Once the needs of the reader are accepted as the controlling concerns for writing, then the need for understanding how sentences are likely to function overcomes the more student-centered concern for how we can turn out sentences that will indicate we did the task assigned. (6)

In other words, this is precisely the kind of pedagogy--cultivating a fundamental attention to others--that so much focus on self-improvement and critical thinking, even critical empathy, misses. Learning to be kind or understanding of others is ultimately far more self-serving (it is, finally, about the student herself) than learning that every instantiation of praxis is constituted by service of and a foregoing relationship with the other.

[X-posted at Blogging Pedagogy. I'm pasting here for reasons my comment should make clear.]

Some of you may have seen the article At Some Medical Schools, Humanities Join the Curriculum in Monday's New York Times.

Prompted by the fact that

Three years ago, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine began an art-appreciation course for medical students, joining a growing number of medical schools [like "Yale, Stanford Cornell and a few other medical schools"] that are adding humanities to the usual forced march of physiology, pathology and microbiology

this article documents several students' experience in and (potential) use of a visit to the Met.